Three doughnuts and two cups of coffee had only whetted Qwilleran's appetite, and he walked to Lois's for buckwheat pancakes with Canadian bacon, maple syrup, and double butter. Lois herself was waiting on tables, and when she brought his order, he thought the pancakes looked unusual. He tasted them cautiously.
"Lois," he called out, "what's wrong with these pancakes?"
She stared briefly at the plate before snatching it away. "You got Mrs. Toodle's oat bran pancakes!" She took the plate to another table and returned with the right one. "Do these look better? She put margarine and honey on 'em, but she hadn't started to eat."
That's the way it was in that restaurant - informal. Lois was a hard-working woman who owned her own business, labored long hours, enjoyed every aspect of her job, and jollied or insulted the customers with impunity. She had been feeding downtown Pickax for thirty years, and her devoted clientele regularly took up collections to finance building repairs, since the "stingy old woman" who owned the place would do nothing about maintenance. Twice Qwilleran had dropped a twenty-dollar bill into the pickle jar.
"So you lost one of your good customers!" he said to Lois when he paid his check. "Who?"
"Euphonia Gage."
"That old witch? You gotta be kidding! She was too hoity-toity to come in here," Lois said with lofty disdain. "She sent her housekeeper to collect the rent. When her husband was alive, he came in himself, and I fixed him a thick roast beef sandwich with horseradish. Nice man! If I was short of cash, he didn't mind coming back the next day."
"For another sandwich?" Qwilleran inquired.
"You men!" Lois snapped with a grimace that was half rebuke and half fondness.
Walking home, Qwilleran began to formulate his profile of Junior's grandmother. He would call it "The Several Hats of Mrs. Gage." She was dancer, snob, health nut, and "purplist," a word he had coined. She was generous, stingy, elegant, aloof, witty, unpredictable, gracious, and hoity-toity.
Later, he was sitting at his desk, making notes for the profile, when Koko trudged past the library door with something in his mouth. The plodding gait, lowered head, and horizontal tail suggested serious business. Kao K'o Kung was not a mouser - he left that occupation to Yum Yum - but his behavior was suspiciously predatory, and Qwilleran followed him stealthily. When within tackling distance, he grabbed Koko around the middle and commanded, "Drop that filthy thing!"
Koko, who never took orders gladly, squirmed and clamped his jaws on the prey, shaking his head to prevent the forcible opening of his mouth. Realizing it was no mouse, Qwilleran coaxed in a gentler voice, "Let go, Koko. Good boy! Good boy!" And he massaged the furry throat until Koko was induced to lick his nose and lose his grip.
"What next!" Qwilleran said aloud, snatching the trophy. It was a partial denture - left and right molars connected by a silver bridge - and it was destined for the collection site under the kitchen table.
The objects that Yum Yum charmingly pilfered from pockets and wastebaskets were toys, to be hidden behind seat cushions for future reference. Koko was the serious treasure hunter, however. Qwilleran thought of his excavations as an archaeological dig for fragments that might be pieced together to reconstruct a social history of the Gage dynasty. In fact, he had started written inventory. Now he confiscated the denture and carried it to the library, while Koko followed in high dudgeon, scolding and jumping at his hand.
"It's only an old set of false teeth," Qwilleran remonstrated as he dropped it into the desk drawer. "Why dont you dig up a Cartier watch?" He added "partial denture" to the other recent acquisitions on the inventory: leather bookmark, recipe for clam chowder, purple satin bedroom slipper, man's argyle sock, 1951 steeplechase ticket, wine label (Bernkasteler Doktor und Graben Hochfeinst '59).
On Friday afternoon Qwilleran drove to the Black Bear Caf‚, wearing his new multicolor sweater. Although his prime purpose was to inspect the staging area for "The Big Burning," he was also slated to meet a young farm woman who needed advice, and the sweater made him look ten years younger - or so he had been told.
Gary's bar and grill operation was located in the Hotel Booze in the town of Brrr, so named because it was the coldest spot in the county. The hotel had been a major landmark since the nineteenth century, when sailors, miners, and lumberjacks used to kill each other in the saloon on Saturday nights, after which the survivors each paid a quarter to sleep on the floor of the rooms upstairs. It was a boxy building perched on a hilltop overlooking the harbor, and ships in the lake were guided to port by the rooftop sign: BOOZE... ROOMS... FOOD.
When Gary Pratt took over the Hotel Booze from his ailing father, the bar was a popular eatery, but the upper floors violated every building regulation in the book. Yet, the banks refused to lend money to bring it up to code, possibly because of Gary's shaggy black beard and wild head of hair, or because he had been a troublesome student in high school. Qwilleran had a hunch about Gary's potential, however, and the Klingenschoen Foundation obliged with a low-interest economic development loan. With the addition of elevators, indoor plumbing, and beds in the sleeping rooms, the Hotel Booze became the flagship of Brrr's burgeoning tourist trade, and Gary became president of the chamber of commerce. Wisely he maintained the seedy atmosphere that appealed to sportsmen. The mirror over the backbar still had the radiating cracks where a bottle had been flung by a drunken patron during the 1913 mine strike.
When Qwilleran arrived on that Friday afternoon he slid cautiously onto a wobbly barstool, and Gary, behind the carved black walnut bar, asked, "Squunk water on the rocks?"
"Not this time. I'll take coffee if you have it. How's business?"
"It'll pick up when the hunting season opens. I hope we get some snow. The hunters like a little snow for tracking."
"They say we're in for a lot of it this winter." It was one of the trite remarks Qwilleran had learned to make; local etiquette called for three minutes of weatherspeak before any purposeful conversation.
"I like snow," said Gary. "I've been dog-sledding the last couple of winters."
"Sounds like an interesting sport," Qwilleran said, although the idea of being transported by dogpower had no appeal for him.
"You should try it! Come out with me some Sunday!"
"That's an idea," was Qwilleran's carefully ambiguous response.
"Say, I've been meaning to ask you about the different characters in your show. It must have been hard to change your voice like that. I sure couldn't do it."
"I've always had a fairly good ear for different kinds of speech," Qwilleran said with a humble shrug. "The big problem was recording the voices. When I played them back, the tape was punctuated with the yowling of cats. So I locked them out of the room and tried again. This time the mike picked up a trash impactor and the sheriff's helicopter. I finally recorded at three o'clock in the morning and hoped no one in my neighborhood would require an ambulance."
"Well, it sure was impressive. Where did you get all your information? Or did you make some of it up?"
"Every statement is documented," Qwilleran said. "Do you know anything about the Gage family? One of them was an amateur historian."
"All I know is that this woman who just died - her husband used to hang around the bar when my father was running it. Dad said he was quite a boozer. Liked to swap stories with the hunters and fishermen. Never put on airs. Just one of the guys."
"Did you ever meet him?"
"No, he died before I took over-struck by lightning. He was horseback riding when a storm broke, and he made the mistake of sheltering under a tree. Killed instantly!"
"What about the horse?" Qwilleran asked.